Sick, Bruh

For most middle class white people in America, it takes a lot of emotional investment and genuine effort to feel threatened in any way. Even though some of us don't necessarily want to admit it, the entire apparatus of state and all its associated agencies are bent toward one thing: the protection and preservation of our property. I would say "and our persons" as well, but really, what is anyone's personhood in the United States these days that isn't reduceable to a simple formula calculating your value to advertisers as a function of your future potential purchasing power toward goods and services? The internet is a "new" thing socially, sure, but it's just a faster (instantaneous even!) way of aggregating and aggregating and aggregating our spending and consumer habits. We've all had an experience like I've had this week, wherein I bought a pair of shoes--a transaction completed entirely in meatspace, at a brick-and-mortar shoe store with zero online perusal--and immediately upon getting home and turning on my computer for the first time, being confronted with an ad for the exact shoes I'd just bought. I don't believe in the supernatural and I certainly don't have any time for the idea of an anthropomorphic god, but the mind-reading powers of the internet banner ad algorithm is the closest I've come to making me believe in something paranormal.

I know I can drive my car too fast, play my music too loud, have too many people over to the house,* experiment with drugs, drink too much, even raise my voice to a police officer and I'm mostly likely going to be fine from a state-power point of view. I know the police are way more likely to be preoccupied bothering people doing none of those things in minority neighborhoods, to question young men "fitting the description..." or to stop and frisk, preemptively keeping them from even forming the idea of maybe one day wandering into my neighborhood and potentially--even potentially!--making one cracker-ass white lady cross the street to avoid them. Even as a genuine threat to public safety, I know as a non-habitual offender, I'm as likely as anything to be let off with a stern warning. And maybe even a citation! But the odds of me being commanded out of a parked vehicle at gunpoint and then having my neck crushed by the boot (or the knee, take your pick. The airway is agnostic on this choice) of the forces for Order. "Order" meaning tidy, structured organization but also obviously meaning a ranked hierarchy of preference.

This sort of dissociation from your own mortality makes an abstraction of the existential. To paraphrase James Baldwin,** black people in America know from the time they are five or six that life is going to be hard and that they are going to die, then they simply get on with living with this knowledge; white people don't have to realize the same thing until around the time the are 30, then they go find a therapist. I grew up poor, but I know I still grew up privileged.

The hook of the consumer culture is also the anesthesia of maintaining. One must work, usually minimally 40 hours weekly, at the same place, with the same people, doing the same thing, to pay the same bills, to stay in the same domicile, with the same level of "quality of living." There is of course the push and the drive (sometimes both!) to get to more, to acquire more, to achieve more, but we know in the strata above us, there's more pressure and more work to maintain that level. But the days squish into weeks and the weeks compress into months and next thing you know, your youngest child is about to start his senior year of high school and about half your chest hair has turned gray. Just as a random example.

Last week circumstances led me to have a test for COVID-19 done. I hadn't been feeling particularly poorly, but the congestion and scratchy throat persisted and persisted, plus I was about to possibly go back into the office for the first time since March, and I couldn't in good conscience go be around people (some of whom I genuinely like) with any kind of symptoms when we're living with the specter of infection that can present as mildly as no symptoms.

So I got in my adorable little car and drove down to Lake Elsinore, a distinctly unadorable part of inland Southern California. It's like the Albuquerque you see in Breaking Bad, except in the middle there's a lake where all the fish mysteriously die off once every 3-5 years. No one is sure why, but like everything else in Elsinore, when you don't know, it's safe to guess: meth.

I went there because that was the only place I could find an appointment in a reasonable time. The county says CVS stores offer drive-up, next day testing, but on the websites it was literally impossible to find even one appointment time, no matter how far out on the calendar one looks, the point of which therefore had to be something other than actually obtaining a test. A text-based online prank show maybe? Chinese data mining? Something something cryptocurrency? I assume we won't know until the subpoenas go out.

The testing site in Lake Elsinore was the parking lot of a Single-A minor league baseball stadium which, in contravention of everything else I just told you about this place, is actually quite charming. The line went fairly quickly, the people were friendly, receptive, patiently helpful, not just professional but genuinely empathetic. I never had to get out of the car. A nice woman in enough hazmat gear to strip an attic of asbestos apologized as she swabbed my throat (not the deepest recesses of my sinuses directly adjacent to my brain, as I'd been led to believe) and I was on my way.

And then the next few days, even though I was 99% sure I didn't have it,**** I had to live with the possibility that I was a COVID-19 carrier. That was... sobering. A lot of logistical contingency planning happened in my head, mostly concerning my children, scenarios ranging from sobering to catastrophizing. Logically, even if I did have it, I'd had it for a while (the congestion and throat issues were not new) and was likely to be through the worst of it, during which I never to my knowledge turned blue in the face, lost my senses of taste and smell nor started throwing blood clots to destroy my organs and limbs. But because I'm a sensitive, privileged white dude, you guys, the suffering was so real. What if the worst happened? What would become of my poor, grown children? What would they do with all my precious, precious stuff?

Besides disinfect it all, of course.

---

*You know, back when people could still do that. But I guess it's possible to have too much of that now?

**Yep, I'm still on that. I will find all of his recorded speeches and appearances. YouTube is a wide and vast sea of possibility.

***You know, back when people could still do that.

****I didn't have it.